You can listen to Episode S3E4 right here!
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Hello, and welcome to the Third Age Design podcast sharing essential information on senior environments. I’m Lori Pinkerton-Rolet. The physiological changes that occur with ageing can impair appetite. These include changes to the digestive system, hormonal changes, disease, pain, changes in the sense of smell, taste and vision, and a decreased need for energy. Now changes to the digestive system can contribute to a declining appetite. And this month, our TAD podcast continues our series entitled, designing for the OTHER four senses. We’re always designing of course for operational requirements and how things look, but this month we’re reviewing the sense of taste, and what design professionals can add to an environment to facilitate appetite. I’ll shortly be speaking with design professional and university lecturer Diana Celella about this important topic. And, a couple of months back or innovation spotlight told you about salute him CEO John Gordon, who switched places with a carer for a day. We said we tried to get him on the podcast to discuss his lessons learned, and you’re going to hear from him later in the podcast, including a rather unexpected outcome specifically related to assistance with dining. American writer William Arthur Ward has said: ‘Blessed is he who learns to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.’ Yep, there’s a lot to unpick there. But here at Third Age Design, we believe in admiring the work of others, following best practice without direct imitation, and to lead by sharing what we’ve learned. And this is an open invitation for you to take part. Go to our website at Third Age.Design and hit the ‘Join Us’ button. You’ll automatically receive this quarter’s ‘A TAD Extra’, which is exclusive information for our community members. You can also share blogs on our website, or lists sector events. Together we’re working to research and share information on interior environments for the Third Age internationally in order to improve standards everywhere. Plus, it’s entirely free. We have listeners in 22 countries, and the podcast is translated through our website into 12 languages in addition to English. Come on, what are you waiting for? The Third Age Design podcast is supported by Innova Care Concepts whose mission is to enhance quality of life through innovation. From hydrotherapy pools to furniture, you’ll find quality, aesthetics, and functionality in all unique Innova products. Innova Care Concepts- the leading edge of health care. Okay, let’s get started. ‘Daily Caring’ was awarded ‘Best Senior Caregiving Website in 2022. And under the heading common senior conditions they list 10 reasons why seniors lose their appetite. These include lack of exercise, hydration, lack of routine, depression, and many more. You’ll find a link on our website at third age.com to the full article. But today we’re fortunate to be joined by design expert Diana Cellela, an international award winning designer director of the drawing room interiors associate consultant Hammond care, dementia choice past president of the SBID and Past Chairman of the Healthcare Design Panel or HDAC. She works in the commercial interior sector specialising in healthcare projects from care homes and dental practices to assisted living and retirement villages. And she’s recognised throughout the industry as an expert in implementing evidence-based design. Diana is also a university lecturer for the master’s programme and interior design at Southampton University in the United Kingdom. Diana, welcome. I can’t believe you have time to talk to us.
Diana Celella
Oh, thank you so much, Lori. That’s really kind of you. Kind of just correct it’s-it’s Arts University. Bournemouth, not Southampton, sorry.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Oh goodness, that is a very big oversight or my I don’t know how I how I did that.
Diana Celella
Sorry. Sorry. Direction. All right. Sorry. Thank you so much for inviting me today. It’s really kind of you.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
As our topic is taste today, while we’re looking at designing for the other four senses, rather than just the way things look, I’m just wondering if you’re familiar with the practice of putting clear glass refrigerators in dementia corridors, for example, where you might have fresh food on plates all the time. And I’m just wondering if you’ve ever done that in your in your own practice, and what you needed to do to get that to work well for residents.
Diana Celella
I haven’t put any glass refrigerators and dementia corridors. However, I have used them in other areas. So strangely, I’m actually working on a design at the moment for a sideboard unit for a client, which is not only going to have a glass- fronted fridge, it’s it’s also going to have a glass-fronted freezer. And that’s to go in various dementia units. So the idea is to put fresh chilled food and drink but also offer ice creams and ice lollies. So the unit will be going into lounge/dining areas mostly. So we don’t need to put down any handrails or anything but we’re actually putting like a section in between. So if you imagine there’d be a fridge glass-fronted at one end at the sideboard, the other end of freezer in the middle and open area where it can have plates and glasses, and so it’s very open for people to be able to see. So, yeah, so we’re working on that at the moment. As to your question, is it a successful intervention, obviously, we’ve got to be careful or the carers need to be careful to make sure there aren’t any residents that have got a risk of choking within the unit before they put food available to just take. So that’s got to be risk-assessed. But apart from that, the current homes that I’ve worked on work with a lot of them make, you know, fresh daily snacks available all day. And they seem to work really well especially for people living with dementia because sometimes they prefer to eat little and often and that the set times for dining so it’s nice to have other food and you know, available at any time.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And also there seems to be a predominance of interest in things that are sweet. So I’m quite intrigued by the concept of putting in a freezer where you can see ice lollies and these these can be you know fruit they could be quite healthy as well couldn’t they?
Diana Celella
Exactly and they’re a good way sometimes it’s quite hard to hard to hydrate people. They don’t always drink enough water. So obviously ice lollies is another way of hydrating especially in the summer. So yeah, I think it’s a nice idea.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
I think it’s a brilliant idea and I love the addition of the of the freezer that can support that. Do you think there are any particular colours that you think are very good for enhancing appetite in senior environments and any that you’d really like to recommend to listeners that they might want to stay away from?
Diana Celella
Well from a colour psychology point of view, we always say red is appetite-inducing colour. But that doesn’t mean that I use red in every dining room because red has all of the connotations as well, you know, danger, stop, all sorts of things. So I tend to use colours, which are calming, and encourage residents to sit and enjoy their food. So I often use nature like a biophilic-type feel in dining area. So perhaps pale greens, I tend to avoid the darker shades of green, blue, reds and purples, because they can cast colour on food and you know. And particular shades of blue can be appetite-suppressing some careful which shades of blue doesn’t mean, I don’t use blue, but I’m very careful on the shades of blue I might use within a dining area.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So which are the shades that you would have blue that you would stay away from? in particular? Better blues? or green or…
Diana Celella
Yeah, the colder side of blue. So your grey, grey blues, your blues going more towards the warmer side. You know, coming over towards the…almost going into the purpley sort of, you know, reddy hues of blue. I think I’m much better. Yeah,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Right. Okay. Um, artwork is also a tricky one, particularly in communal spaces, because not everyone has the same taste in art, obviously. How do you approach that in dining areas without having literal pictures of food? Like you might get in a in a canteen someplace? Or do you actually have literal pictures of food? And where would you use those and where wouldn’t you use those?
Diana Celella
So I do use images or pictures related to food, I find that dementia enabling so they prompt residents, to allow them to realise what the room’s function is and help with that situation. However, I do like to think I do this with taste. For example, I’ve just finished a care home, where the artwork in one of the dining rooms, I actually use vintage jelly moulds to create three dimensional artwork. Or I might use lovely paintings of fruit and do them as a collage, perhaps with vintage images of people in that area picking apples, or I might use a framed artistic sort of layout of knives and forks to create a space. Anything that’s sort of like related to food, but not necessarily an obvious picture, photograph of like a plate of food, which you often see in looks quite childish almost looks like a bit like a nursery would have. So I do tend to use food-related, but I’d like to think that I did take a slightly different take on that. And I usually try and put pictures of food relation in some way in the corridor near the the dining room as well to again, help wayfinding and help.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yeah, as a way of flowing into into that space and natural way. How do you address lighting when people are eating? So these days, restaurants and hotels where their dining areas – it’s so dark you can you can barely see, and obviously as people age, they require brighter light levels. What sort of colour temperature would you be looking at in these areas?
Diana Celella
Well, as you said, the most important thing is to have a good lighting level and the complete room. No shadows, no dark corners, diffused light, so there isn’t glare. Natural light is by far the best light. So I’m very careful with how I dressed the window. So if there’s curtains, you know, pulling them back as far off the window as possible to let in the maximum daylight. And as you said, As we age, we need more light-people over 65 will on average need double the amount of light of 20 year olds, which is quite incredible really. So it shows the importance of getting the lighting levels correct in a care home. As far as lighting temperature goes, I usually aim for around the 2700 Kelvin, which gives a… it’s on the warmer scale but less clinical. Right? We’re possible I usually work with a lighting designer to ensure that we can reach a constant lux levels, correct temperature, and also achieving good lighting levels without too much differentiation between areas. So if you’ve got the corridor, and then going into the dining room, you don’t want a sudden change in the LUXs levels. Because as we age our pupils take longer to adjust. So it’s trying to even out that sort of, you know, constant light is I feel is the most important which why we often bring in like a lighting expert to help us achieve that.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And then that also goes back to what you were saying with the artwork, your flow from one space to the other becomes more natural without your your body or any of your senses having to do a strong adjustment. In other words, exactly, yeah. One thing we’ve noticed is, food delivery seems to be quite different between different operators. And this is both in retirement and care and dementia. There’s everything from the bain marie hot trolleys, to custom design services, homestyle cooking in household models. What do you get asked for the most Diana, and then the second part of this question is, what do you think the future of food delivery will be like? And… that designers and architects and operators should really start focusing in on?
Diana Celella
Well, the most common delivery that most of my clients use is the one you mentioned, the bain marie trolley, and I tend to design a housing within the kitchen or kitchen island that it then fits in becomes part of the kitchen.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So they plug it in, they take it from the main kitchen, put it into the space and plug it in again to keep it warm.
Diana Celella
Exactly. That’s what most people do. And I found that dining rooms, thank goodness are becoming smaller. So the less institutional. But sometimes when we’re doing refurbishments, we still have the large dining rooms, which we tend to break up then with sort of room dividers have to make them feel more domestic less institutional, less canteen, like, right, and which also helps with the acoustics, which can be a major contributor to frustration in dining. The model I feel care wants to move towards, budget allowing, is for cooking to take place within the kitchen areas themselves creating their own real kitchen smells, allowing residents to be involved in food preparation should they wish, even if it’s partly prepared somewhere else, with gardens, growing fruit, herbs, vegetables in high level planters, so residents can be involved with the growing and the picking to use within the kitchens. I think this is the ideal on the future. But often budget gets in the way of this. So you know, that’s a sad part of that. But I think that’s the way of the future.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Budget gets involved in a lot of things! Acoustics… and they are quite bright acoustically because generally you will have some sort of hard flooring surface. You will have tables you have cutlery you’ll have general noise. What other acoustic interventions have you found useful in these spaces?
Diana Celella
Well, absolutely dining rooms tend to have, as you said, lots of hard surfaces, the sound reverberate the noise of cutlery and plates. And as a designer, I am so aware of acoustics in designing places. I’m hard of hearing myself, I wear hearing aids, so I know how awful and isolating it is to sit in a dining area where I can hear the clunk of dishes, but not the person sitting next to me. And speaking to me, it’s embarrassing to ask someone to keep repeating what they’ve said. So you do tend to withdraw from the conversation and take yourself out of that, which is quite isolating.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
It should be a social occasion to a certain extent. Exactly.
Diana Celella
So I’m really aware of this in dining areas. So I often use acoustic what I call acoustic artwork, which is artwork digitally printed onto sound absorbing substrate. And they look like normal artwork, but they’re actually absorbing sound. So often use that I’ve also used in the past like acoustic tiles, which can make art statements, you know, 3d patterns. And they’re usually in sustainable finishes. So there’s lots of them now made out of recycled plastic bottles, that sort of thing. I’ve also once used acoustic light fittings over tables, so the lights themselves were sound sound absorbing as well, which was quite good.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That’s a totally new one on me.
Diana Celella
Yeah, the only disadvantage in that there’s advantages and disadvantages, you need them quite low. And the main data that they tend to be made at the same fabric as as as the acoustic tiles, you know, like this, almost thick, thick felt, yes. But you need to happen low over the table, which is great if you’re always going to keep the dining room in that layout. But however, if you want to move the layout round for I don’t know it perhaps a room doubles-up for other activities because then it doesn’t work so well all you need to go from the ceiling to hook them up. So that’s when it doesn’t work quite so well. But then as well as it’s it use heavy fabrics and the curtains, breathable upholstery fabrics, perhaps acoustic flooring so everything to try and help absorb as much of this sound that we can in a dining room.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And then that will make the experience better for the diner. Yes. When whenever they’re in that space, you also mentioned in terms of the future having smells, by people making food in their own kitchen area. Do you do anything right now with adding smells into dining areas? And if so, what sort of smells do you add?
Diana Celella
We have used commercial scent machines before. So in the dining areas, we’ve done things like you know, the smell of bread, coffee, in dementia areas where food is not being cooked on the premises, as we’ve talked about, and there isn’t smell, it’s really important to you know, try and gain people’s appetite. Some people living with dementia can, you know, lose some of their appetite. So it’s anything that can help them. You know, so we’ve used, we have used a commercial scent machines in those situations. We’ve also used scent machines in other areas. So say sensory rooms where we’ve used smells of sea or cut grass, all sorts of different brands.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And the the table setting itself, do you ever get involved in that? Because when we go to trade shows doesn’t matter what part of the world you’re in…there are always specialist knives and forks, but also plates that might have coloured rings on them. Is that something that you ever get involved with? Or is that generally handled elsewhere within the the the care home or facility?
Diana Celella
Absolutely, I do get involved because I need to ensure there’s a contrast between the table or if they use the tablecloth, the table cloth with the placemat, then a contrast between the placemat and the plate. And the plate colour is very important because we need to get a good LRV light reflectance value difference between the food and the plate. So the resident can actually see the food well. Blue is often used in care home plates, the theory being that there’s not many foods or any foods, perhaps, that are blue in colour, so it’ll show up. But the problem with that is that it’s not the colour, we should be looking at it’s the LRV. So if you put a certain shade of green lettuce leaf, say on a blue plate, it might not necessarily be that visible. So I do have clients that use two different colours of plates depend on the food being served. So for example, if they were serving something like say chicken and mashed potato,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
I was just thinking mash and meat is a good…
Diana Celella
If they were doing say, salad with salmon, they might use a white plate. So the change because the importance isn’t the colour is the light reflectancy value. And it’s making sure somebody with a sight some sort of sight impediment, or perhaps dementia can see the food to actually be able to eat it. So the contrast is really important. Yeah, so probably get involved more in that than that the obviously the plates are often have high sides to make it easier for the food doesn’t sort of run away. If you like to try to cut it, I probably get more involved in the colour and the contrast than I do in the sides and special cutlery because the cutlery is really different for different needs.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, this is a manual dexterity issue as much as anything else, which might be more of an occupational therapists approach. But then your placemats that you were talking about, you’d need two sets of placemats to go with your two sets of plates. Yeah, that’s all part of the supply of FF& E presumably at that point.
Diana Celella
Exactly.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Um, do you ever do height adjustable tables, there are so many different heights of wheelchair, for example, that if people have different needs, there’s a bit of a tension I find between offering different heights of table and staff actually having the time to be adjusting table heights, taking everything off making sure it’s locked and safe. How do you sit on that? And how much of that do you get involved with?
Diana Celella
So in many, many projects, we do use height adjustable tables to accommodate different wheelchair heights. It’s really important that people in a wheelchair can sit up to the table because with a table that’s not height adjustable they often end up sitting so far away from the table because the wheelchair won’t go underneath that they can’t actually reach the table. And then the result of that is somebody has to feed them and then they’re losing independence, which is really sad. And I think it’s our duty to enable people as much as we can for independence. However, I totally agree with what you’ve said the number of times I’ve put height adjustable tables into projects and then I go back and they’ve been left at the same height from the beginning. Yeah, so I have got clients that said, Look, we’re not going to pay the extra for it just because it just doesn’t happen. So it is a problem. And I think that’s down to sort of staff training. And we try and go in with finish a project and give as much staff training as we can. And but, you know, it is it is extra time taken. If usually, you know, you get if you can get the same person in the same type of wheelchair to sit at the same table each day, perhaps you can adjust them for that, yes, in a wheelchair, because it is so important. And it must be so frustrating for somebody to have the ability to feed themselves, but they can’t reach the food. I mean, I can’t imagine that frustration.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Now, and part of the issue must also be the staffing itself, because it’s so difficult to get staff, not only here in the UK, where we’re recording today, but really all over the world, that there’s a lot of agency staff use. So even if you were training people, the day that you hand, the building over there unlikely to be the people that are actually assisting in the dining two months from now.
Diana Celella
Yeah. And they might not even realise that the table has an ability to go up and down. You know, so yeah, I agree. I think it is a problem. But we do use them, we do use them. And when they use property, they’re really successful. They’re really successful.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Speaking of successful, what would you say Diana has been your most successful, senior living dining facility that you’ve ever designed? And why?
Diana Celella
Gosh, that’s a difficult question.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Because you can’t you don’t want to pick your clients on a podcast, and yours was best. But perhaps more conceptually.
Diana Celella
I was gonna say, I suppose I always think the latest project I’ve done is always better, perhaps in some ways, because our knowledge increases with every project we do says more evidence-based research done by the universities, which is available for us to to learn from
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
also, universities that you’re working at, not the ones that I’m making up, is that correct? Sorry, go ahead…
Diana Celella
I’m sure you do the same, I go back projects after the finished, what about six months later, and see how things are working. So I can learn from what I’ve done right and wrong, what’s worked well and what’s not. So therefore, I almost feel as though each project is an improvement on the last. And I say that loosely because it’s brief allowing. So you know, sometimes you brief or allow that. But I you know, generally I’d say the last project is done with more knowledge than the last one. And we gained this knowledge as we go along. So the last large project I did new build, I had a wonderful client who was very knowledgeable in their own right on dementia friendly design, and keen to try new ideas, which is great. And it made him very interesting project to work on. We had small dining rooms that felt more domestic. And they were doubling up as activity rooms. So I designed kitchens to disappear so that they disappeared when wasn’t used as kitchens. So we had kitchens with doors that closed on the kitchen and it made it look like almost like a dress a piece of furniture when the room changed function. So that was so far quite successful in that it meant that you’re going into an activity room then rather than going into a dining room. Because when we’ve got a very open kitchens, it always looks like a kitchen.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And like you’re doing something else in the kitchen. So this transformative room. Yeah. You designed it. Yeah.
Diana Celella
And also for people with dementia, it’s less distracting and then that there’s all this kitchen equipment this kitchen equipments now disappeared. So I found that that that was quite an unusual thing to do. On that same project, we use very unusual artwork throughout. It was a care home that was being built in grounds of their old care home where the residents were living there moving into new care home and they all can be demolished afterwards. So I took lots of memorabilia from the old care home and reused it so it didn’t feel like something absolutely brand new.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Nothing totally foreign.
Diana Celella
Yeah, I tried to. And then we use an international muralist to hand paint Ryan Lachlan, who hand painted the most fantastic murals on the walls. And that helped with wayfinding to things like the dining areas, you know, we had just past one of the dining rooms, we had this magnificent tree outside. So I made it sort of bird watching area, binoculars, some bird books, and he painted the corridor with all different trees, but going through the seasons, so it led down. So, um, we did sort of wayfinding murals outside dining areas. So yeah, it was it was really nice to work on and fun. Yeah.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Oh, that’s very inspiring. That’s wonderful thing to end on. I thank you so much for taking part of this in the podcast and sharing yourwisdom and experience. And to our listeners, you’ll find direct links to Drawing Room Interiors, and additional research on today’s topic on the podcast page for this episode at Third Age. Design.
Diana Celella
Thank you so much for inviting me, Lori
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
As I mentioned, at the top of today’s podcast, we’ve been tracking a story for a couple of months now related to the idea of a job swap. What might be learned from this? In today’s ‘Innovation Spotlight’, I’m speaking with John Godden, CEO of Salutem Care and Education with over 130 services offered nationwide across the United Kingdom. Hello, John.
John Godden
Hi, Lori. Pleasure to be here.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
We had read about your interaction one to one with people in a Salutem facilities. So I just a little background, among other activities, you develop care facilities, and you host other sorts of innovations within the sector. In other words, you’re very, very busy. So the first question is, what made you think of switching jobs for a day with a care assistant?
John Godden
Look, I mean, you know, we’re an organisation of 3000 people or so each of whom are equally important. And, you know, we provide care and education for people with complex needs across the country. And that’s delivered, as you say, across 130 locations. A big part of my job is making decisions that have an impact on what happens at the front. And, you know, make hopefully, things better, but you know, if I get it wrong, can make things worse for those delivering the care particularly to all of our, all of the individuals in our, in our services. So you can’t, I can’t do that job, really, in a vacuum. You know, I need more information. Now, classically, a lot of that information sort of percolates through an organisation through information systems, whether that’s, you know, data or feedback, or reports and all of those sorts of things. But there’s really no substitute for just going in and feeling it for yourself and experiencing it. So that’s where the idea was born. But it came to fruition via another thing that we do, which is to give our staff a voice, we have the Salutem of employee listening forum, S.E.L.F., somebody was up all night thinking about that one. And, and one of the one of the elected reps, they’re a very experienced carer actually sort of really liked his idea and he enabled it. So of course, you know, there’s there’s a lot of skill involved in what he does every day to look after the people in his care, which is, which a guy is suffering from cerebral palsy. So he works in a service for three young guys with cerebral palsy, they’re in their 20s. And I couldn’t just turn up and do his job. So what I did is I did his job with him. Right, right. And he in turn, will come and do my job with me. We haven’t fixed the date for that. We will do that soon. But yeah, the idea was to give me to put me as much as possible in his shoes for a day. So I could really experience what it is like to do his job.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Was there anything that you found specifically surprising about his role?
John Godden
Yeah, I mean, yes, I actually I would categorise it as surprising, although, you know, none of it is sort of unknown and magic, but it was the degree of skill of basic tasks. That’s that he deploys. And, you know, we’ve always railed against people being dismissive of a carer as as a profession, that’s, you know, easy and unskilled and manual, all those things, and it isn’t. And just the, the tasks that he was having to perform every day in order to enable the three guys in that service to get through their day, in a positive way were conducted with such a level of dexterity and skill. That meant that he delivered those and was then able to layer up on top of the delivery of care, relationship-building with these guys, and, you know, really giving them the sort of experience that you would want any 25 year old guy to have in life. But yeah, the really remarkable thing was just that the level of skill of all of the basics was way beyond what was in my mind and understanding. And I haven’t had the privilege of being a frontline carer, my route into this job was somewhat different. So it was more important, that experienced and felt that the way the equipment was deployed the way that it was just done with ease and comfort, something that takes a long time to learn and get right,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
that manual handling and that sort of thing.
John Godden
But the manual handling, but the processes, the order of the process is, you know, the and the detail of it. But, you know, it’s when you’ve got people who’ve got severe physical disabilities, everything’s a hassle. Right? You know, as you started putting, you know, so all your simple tasks, you know, the obvious ones, you know, going to the bathroom, but you know, getting dressed and, and getting up and, and choosing your clothes, and doing feeding all of those sorts of things is a lot more to that process is a lot more thoughts of that process. You know, we all do it, we’re lucky, you know, it’s all very natural to us, we haven’t got those different disabilities, and difficulties and challenges. But just the, the way that everything was done and was moved through with such grace and elegance, actually, some very complex things. And of course, you know, no two days and no two actions are the same. So the flexibility of thought to just react to something with ease and just be able to do it was was really lovely to see.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yeah, you sound very, very impressed with what you took on there. I’m, I’m just wondering, in terms of the interior environment in which the residents are in and the staff is working, did you make any mental notes on the day or in retrospect about the environment, in particular, short,
John Godden
and you know, an environment like this, where you have a lot of moving and handling equipment, a lot of spare beds, and standing frames and all the different sort of mechanical devices we bring, and then you layer that up with, you know, medication, equipment, all that sort of stuff. It’s very, very easy to just deliver that in a very sort of institutionalised clinical way. But this is a home for three guys. Right? And your first impression is always well, if these three mid 20s Guys were living in a bungalow together, what is it they want, you know, how do they want to live, it’s their home. And you’ve got to bridge that you’ve got to get all of the equipment that they need, in a way that is an enjoyable environment, both delivering for them, but also seamlessly integrated with what the staff need. So, yeah, a few, a few things actually, that really sort of stood out was we hadn’t necessarily got that balance right, particularly in terms of the staff needs. And I think that the home is homely, bedrooms definitely shared a common D that the common areas maybe bathrooms, not the bathrooms were way too institutionalised. I mean they you wouldn’t have a bathroom decorated that way in your in your home. Yeah. So that’s something we need to work on. And a lot of thought and effort had been put into the bedroom environments and a little bit more to do in the common areas. But the bathrooms particularly were I felt we could do that better.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And what about the staff any separated staff accommodation or pieces?
John Godden
Yeah, It wasn’t there wasn’t much separate. I mean, you know, it’s a smallish environment, which is good. You know, and you know that that is something to be applauded, you know, , it’s anti institutional in that respect. And, and the staff, obviously have got jobs that they need to be doing during their day, I mean, mostly around, you know, the recording of things, which you need to do for regulatory purposes and progression purposes. So we didn’t necessarily the separation space was, was there, but actually, and we do need to do a bit more on that, that wasn’t good enough. But he was actually dealing with the staff requirements, when they were around the service users, that was something I felt was not right. So you’ve got three guys who, you know, in their various moments are either in a bed for sleeping, or they’re in various chairs for moving around for personal care for bathing, and then they’ve got standing frames. So all of their sitting and standing needs are taken care of by fairly specific equipment. And that’s fine, that’s great. But then you get to will, the staff need to be, you know, accommodated at that level, also, whether they’re interacting with the individuals, or whether they’re quickly off doing their electronic note taking or whatever it might be. And there was just a rubbish sofa, and some slightly poxy little chairs that they could sit in front of somebody in their, in their motorised chair to help them with food. So
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Front of House, the thought, yeah, it was afterthought. It wasn’t,
John Godden
it wasn’t, as you know, the thought that had gone into all of the facilities around the guys was great and obvious, but the thought that had been put in to the needs of the staff around that equipment that they needed to sit to stand, whatever. That wasn’t good enough. There’s there’s work to do on that, that side of things and more comfort, more utility, more accessibility around that. It was, yeah, cheaper.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Front of House, rather than staff back of house.
John Godden
Yeah, was the back of house. Yeah, yeah, the back of house, I think is an issue we all recognise, we will get, look, you know, staff need their space to be able to step away and, and do that, and you need that, you know, you don’t you want a staff breakout room that is appropriate and relaxing, and you want that, I think we all kind of have a in our brain anyway, you know, so that wouldn’t have been a surprise. And you’ll, you always want to try and sort of make that work. But the one thing that I learned really was that front of house interactive staff equipment, and, you know, you go into care facilities where everybody needs a chair, because they are ambulant. And the staff use the same chair as, as a resident individual-use support, and, and that’s fine. But you know, we have an awful lot of services where the needs for sitting of the staff versus the service use are very, very different. And the staff gets forgotten. And it does actually impact negatively on their ability to deliver care.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That is fascinating. And I’ve never heard anybody share that idea before. So that you’ve certainly given me something, something to think about, and I’m sure our listeners as well.
John Godden
But you know, we there’s, it’s now accepted wisdom that in an office environment, you now need to put a good amount of thought and energy into the sitting position, that computer position, the posture, all of that, you know, so money is spent on proper chairs and desks and getting the keyboard. So, you know, that’s, that’s accepted wisdom in that workplace, isn’t it? Yes. And yet, in the workplace that a lot of our staff are in, we haven’t put that same level of care and attention into them. So I found myself, you know, giving lunch to one of the guys so helping him with his, with his eating. And, I mean, obviously, that’s, you know, I’m right in with him. And the stool to sit on was deeply unhelpful. I mean, there was no way given no thought and energy to that at all. And, you know, I’m, I’m reasonably fortunate that you know, my posture is okay, and I don’t suffer from pains and things like that, but you know, a lot of staff do. And you say, well, we’re not helping them here. This is this is not good. So, more work needs to be done on that for sure.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So task, task related items for for this for the staff. I mean, this is part of our in Innovation Spotlight. And so I just would like to ask, do you have other sort of novel initiatives for Salutem them and yourself in the pipeline?
John Godden
We do we do. We’re currently working, we have a joint venture with Kingston University, to use wearables to help bridge the understanding between what an individual we support needs, and what the staff see is that need at a given moment. And, you know, we all know I mean, I use a smartwatch everybody, you know, we’ve got mobile phones that provide us with an awful lot of data about what’s going on on our bodies, you know, we have a high number of individuals we support who are by degree, nonverbal. So we’re working on a piece of equipment where or on an algorithm where we can use the measurements that you can now easily get around the physiology of the human to aid better care. So, again, back to the three guys that I experienced with my day of job sharing, Steve, you know, they were actually one of them was semi-verbal to completely nonverbal, but of course, they communicate by other means. And, you know, really good carers tune into that to a degree. But, you know, we’re not fortunate enough to have carers who, you know, necessarily got 10 years of experience, some of them are a little less experienced than that. So we wanted to bring something that gave them the sort of messaging and reading of a more than a more experienced carer might be able to pick up. So we’re using the wearable technology to provide signals that then get correlated with things that we then know around, maybe discomfort. So if one of these nonverbal guys is uncomfortable in their chair, they need to be moved. Well, how do they communicate that? How do we know and actually it correlates highly with heart rate. body temperature, actually, one of the biggest correlations is body hydration, body hydration is an incredible indicator for comfort or discomfort. So we’re working on a project with Kingston to measure that. So that on a live bases, the carriers have more information about how the individual is at that moment in time, but then on a longer term basis, gives us feedback about what changes what impact changes have had, I mean, you know, the the technology around the chairs, that people with physical disabilities have moved on in leaps and bounds. And, you know, we all see that they are more comfortable, more able to move all of those things. But what we’re doing with Kingston is going to give us much better feedback loops on that, we are going to be able to see straight away what impact a change in a chair or profiling bed, you know, whatever it might be even the equipment in a in a personal care suite. And we’ll be able to see changing patterns of comfort and physiology, by changing environment and other factors in their care. So this is something we’re very excited about.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That is fascinating. And we did a study several years ago with the client where we created sample rooms for a group of people that were going to move from one facility to another, and these were nonverbal people with dementia. And we didn’t have that technology. So what we did was we walked, the people were taken into these spaces with their family members and carers. And then people were trying to interpret which environment in which they felt most comfortable and most at home, so that we could give that scheme to them when they moved into that home. So it seems as if, in terms of interior environments, that could even be stretched into that sort of piece of work as well. 100%.
John Godden
I mean, you know, we all know that, you know, people with dementia, and autism and all these things, they have great sensitivities to temperature to light, not only intensity, but you know, different types of like, we know all these things, and this, you know, there’s a lot of observations that are taking place to tell us these things and development is done. You know, we are trying to put another tool into that toolbox to be able to see faster, hopefully, the the impact that it has on that individual so you can really personalise an environment to best meet that person’s requirements at that moment and you cheapen the process you know, simply as you’re able to get your observations in faster, and you particularly I mean, I know you do an awful lot of work around people with dementia, dementia is incredibly progressive moves very quickly, then their needs and comforts change rapidly. You haven’t gotten the luxury of weeks and months to try and figure this stuff out right to, to do it. So something that can measure it and react to it over days. And then you can change environmental factors to better suit what they need. You know, this is this is progressive stuff, you know, this is where we want to go
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
very progressive and if we can be of any assistance with that in the future, we’d be delighted to because it is very much as a as an industry and as a sector we talk about individualised personalised care, but what what does that ever actually meant other than a care plan? So getting into this further level of development data, individualised service is obviously the way forward. Thank you so much for your time today. And I would like to come back to you sometime in the future to talk about we have more
John Godden
to talk about. Great, thanks. Thanks very much, Lori. It’s been a pleasure.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Just time then for a quick look at our TAD International Events Calendar. The Senior Living Executive Conference is taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, from the eighth to the 10th of May. The Integrated Conference of Integrated Care is in Antwerp, Belgium, from the 22nd to the 24th of May, and we envision this to be very integrated. And the 33rd Alzheimer Europe Conference will take place in Helsinki, Finland, from October the 16th to the 18th. As always, you’ll find further details and listings on the event page at wwwThird Age.Design. And let us know if you have an event you’d like to see listed via our contact page. Thank you to today’s special guests Diana Celella from The Drawing Room Interiors, to our innovation spotlight guest John Gordon of Salutem Care and education. To our producer Mike Scales, to Valerie Adler of The Right Website, to Peter Thorne, who composed our theme music and is playing the piano with Mary Blanchard on flute and to our sponsors, Innova Care Concepts the leading edge of health care. Finally to you. Thank you for being part of a community who believes we can improve senior environments together. I’m Lori Pinkerton-Rolet. Next month we’ll complete our series designing for the other four senses with designing for touch, and we’ll have several experts on hand to help us explore this important touchy feely topic. I do hope you’ll join me.